Gagandeep Kang becomes 1st Indian Woman scientist to be elected Royal Society Fellow

Fifty-one eminent scientists were elected as Fellows of the Royal Society on April 16, along with 10 new Foreign Members and one Honorary Fellow for their exceptional contributions to science. Among the 2019 intakes is Dr Gagandeep Kang, who is purportedly the first woman scientist from India to have received this honour, while Mumbai-born Padma Bhushan awardee Dr Yusuf Hamied was elected as Honorary Fellow.

The Fellowship of the Society is an incredible honour in the scientific world, and Gagandeep Kang, along with the other new Indian Royal Fellows have now joined the ranks of Isaac Newton (1672), Charles Darwin (1839), Michael Faraday (1824), Ernest Rutherford (1903), Albert Einstein (1921), Dorothy Hodgkin (1947), Alan Turing (1951) and Francis Crick (1959) - brilliant scientific minds who created history with their scientific work.

Parsi-born Ardaseer Cursetjee Wadia, an Indian shipbuilder and engineer belonging to the Wadia ship building family, was the first Indian to be elected a Royal Society Fellow, way back in 1841. Since then, there have been a few male scientists from India to follow the line, notably Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918) and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944), but sadly, no female scientist.

Founded on November 28, 1660, the Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, commonly known as the Royal Society, is the oldest scientific academy the world which has been working continuously for 360 years.

Women scientists are typically not easily recognised, especially because the number of women working in STEM fields is still very less compared to the number of male researchers and scientists. Kang herself points out the problem in an article she had written for the Economic times last year.

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